Obituary: Eliot Asinof (1919-2008)

June 26, 2008

The writer Eliot Asinof died on June 10. He was best known for his books about sports, both fiction and non-fiction, and in particular Eight Men Out, which documented the Black Sox baseball scandal that occurred in 1919, the year of Asinof’s birth. Asinof was also a television writer active during the days of live television dramas.

I’m late weighing in on Asinof’s passing, but I wanted to comment on a couple of intriguing aspects of his career that were overlooked by the obituaries. Asinof was blacklisted during the Red scare of the fifties, a fact I did not know until this month, and one which may account for the paucity of known television credits on his resume.

Asinof also had a connection to the blacklist that was not noted by either the New York Times or Los Angeles Times obits, or any others I read. Before he was himself blacklisted, Asinof acted as a front for at least one other blacklisted writer, Walter Bernstein. A “front” was someone who, in essence, impersonated a writer who could not work under his own name. The front presented the blacklisted writer’s work as his own, in many cases even participating in story conferences and rehearsals. This elaborate ruse became necessary after the television networks realized that many blacklisted writers were using pseudonyms and demanded that TV shows produce a real, live person to match any new names that appeared on scripts. Fronting was a thankless and potentially risky task, and it’s possible that it hastened Asinof’s own political troubles, although according to the New York Times Asinof’s FBI file indicated another, more fitting reason for his blacklisting: he had signed a petition on behalf of the black baseball player Jackie Robinson.

Years later Walter Bernstein wrote one of the best books about the blacklist, a personal memoir called Inside Out. Bernstein identifies his fronts only by first name, although we know who most of them are; “Howard,” for instance, was the talented Naked City and Route 66 writer Howard Rodman. Asinof, then, is named only as “Eliot,” and Bernstein gives us a vivid portrait of him:

Eliot was God’s angry man, perpetually at war with the world’s injustice. He did not suffer fools gladly. He was capable of storming unannounced into an editor’s office and terrorizing the place. At times it seemed as though anger was what fueled him and gave him purpose . . . . It also made his life difficult. He could not fathom the difference between demurral and argument. There was a certain purity to Eliot, no capacity to dissemble, and that didn’t help either.

And:

My only concern was that the second script [to bear Asinof’s name] was for a producer who really was a fool and would require foolish script changes. Eliot had to go in as the writer to listen to this, and even though it was not his own script, his sense of injustice was boundless. It was a toss-up whether he would simply, if colorfully denounce the producer for what he was (not just for what he was doing) or just hold him out the window until he saw the error of his ways. Fortunately Eliot did neither of these and the shows went on without incident . . . .

Because Asinof was a writer himself as well as a front for Bernstein, it’s difficult to sort out which of his credits belong to whom. The Goodyear Television Playhouse segment “Man on Spikes” was an adaptation of Asinof’s first novel, a baseball story, so we can assume that Asinof himself wrote that teleplay. On the other hand, we know that Bernstein was an uncredited presence on various David Susskind projects, including the prestigious DuPont Show of the Month – another of his fronts, a non-writer named Leslie Slote, received credit for several of those – so I would tend to put the Asinof-attributed “Body and Soul” episode, an adaptation of the 1947 Robert Rossen-Abraham Polonsky film with Ben Gazzara in the John Garfield role, into the Bernstein column. But “Body and Soul” was a boxing story, so perhaps Asinof the sportswriter made some contributions as well? And I have no idea if Asinof’s 1956 Climax script is really his, although I’d guess that it predates his association with Bernstein.

(During the seventies, Asinof prevailed in a legal battle with David Susskind over the latter’s planned television adaptation of Eight Men Out. Asinof wrote a book called Bleeding Between the Lines, now out of print, about the Susskind litigation.)

Asinof has an inconsequential credit on at least one episode of the anti-mob, Untouchables knockoff Cain’s Hundred; the credits of the 1961 “Markdown on a Man” segment read, “Teleplay by Eliot Asinof and Paul Monash; Story by Irving Elman and Paul Monash.” I had assumed, because this series falls after the worst of the blacklisting period, that this was an authentic Asinof script. Now I’m not so sure.

Cain’s Hundred was produced by Charles Russell, the legendary figure who had endangered his job with CBS by hiring Bernstein, Arnold Manoff, Abe Polonsky, and other blacklistees to write in secret for Danger and You Are There. Russell essentially created the front system. Asinof would have known him from New York too. But there’s a passage in Inside Out (on pages 242-243) in which Bernstein recounts a trip to Los Angeles with Manoff to help out their old friend Russell, who had moved west to produce an “adventure show” and was struggling with the assignment. Russell was drinking heavily, in conflict with his bosses, and saddled with crummy scripts. Inside Out doesn’t give the name of the show in question, but Bernstein writes that the “lead actor was a stiff.” That certainly describes Mark Richman, who played Nicholas Cain, but it could also apply to Gardner McKay, the star of Adventures in Paradise, which Russell produced briefly during the preceding TV season. Was Asinof another New York writer scooped up by Russell to patch up weak teleplays, or was he lending his name to cover Bernstein’s involvement as late as 1961?

The task of mapping Asinof’s blacklist-era credits gets even thornier. In the obituaries, Asinof’s son mentioned the westerns Wagon Train and Maverick as series for which Asinof wrote. I can’t be certain about Wagon Train, but Ed Robertson’s reliable Maverick: Legend of the West indicates that Asinof never received screen credit on an episode of Maverick. Are the obits in error? Did Asinof write for Maverick under a pseudonym? There are a handful of names among the Maverick credits that I can’t verify as real people, but it’s also possible Asinof sold the show an outline or a script that was never produced. Asinof was able to get some work, for himself and for Bernstein, under his own name throughout the height of the blacklist in television in the late fifties. But many lesser-known writers and actors were the victims of an incomplete blacklisting – they could get work at some networks and from some producers, but not others – and this may have been the case with Asinof.

One teleplay not mentioned in Asinof’s obituaries is almost certainly his own work, and deserves comment. It’s a 1964 episode of the college drama Channing entitled “Swing For the Moon” – a baseball story. Asinof’s dialogue is a little clunky, but the story of a promising young athlete (Charles Robinson) and the overbearing older brother (Ralph Meeker) who tries to quash his dreams of a ballplaying career has an emotional resonance.

An addendum: Various online sources indicate that Martin Balsam played inherited John Garfield’s Charlie Davis role in the Play of the Month version of “Body and Soul.” But after some checking I found evidence to support my conviction that it had to be Gazzara – Martin Balsam as a boxing champ is a bit of stretch, even by the sometimes imprecise standards of live TV. Gazzara may also have mentioned it in his autobiography In the Moment: My Life as an Actor, but if so I’ve already forgotten.

2 Responses to “Obituary: Eliot Asinof (1919-2008)”

Many thanks, Stephen, for this fascinating piece on Eliot Asinof. I can’t speak for the rest of his work, but EIGHT MEN OUT is a terrific book which I’d strongly recommend to anyone with any interest in baseball. (And much better, in my view, than the well-intentioned but not-that-successful John Sayles’ film of the same name.)